WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

 

Director: Chris LaMartina

(Additional Direction for the Ads by: James Branscome, Shawn Jones, Scott Maccubbin, Lonnie Martin, Matthew Menter and Andy Schoeb)

Screenplay: Chris LaMartina, Jimmy George, Pat Storck and Michael Joseph Moran

Cast: Paul Fahrenkopf as Frank Stewart; Aaron Henkin as WNUF Announcer (voice); Nicolette le Faye as Veronica Stanze; Leanna Chamish as Deborah Merritt; Richard Cutting as Gavin Gordon; Brian St. August as Dr. Louis Berger; Helenmary Ball as Claire Berger; Robert Long II as Father Joseph Matheson

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #199

 

Iron Maiden rules! White Lion sucks! Woo!

WNUF Halloween Special is one of the most inspired shot-on-video/low budget films ever made. Made to look like the content of a local American television special 1987, with fake adverts, it recreates the tone as accurately as possible. Adding to the film's intentions, the first time the film was made available was by Chris LaMartina taking VHS copies of a limited amount and placing them in places, like Goodwill stores, to deliberately cause people to think it was an actual recording.

Set on the holiday, this begins with the local news and moves to their special investigation of a haunted house, evoking in its own way the legendary BBC production Ghostwatch (1992), which was a major production meant to look like an actual BBC live special. Things will go wrong here too, but not after the "Orange Blast-Off" and "Halloween Make-Up Kit" adverts. Contextually this gets the tone perfectly, set up also as a found footage film, befitting Chris LaMartina's original method of releasing the movie, as if it was recorded off television. Beginning with the evening news hosts, dressed for Halloween and the male host Gavin Gordon (Richard Cutting) a pun merchant willing to cram in as many seasonal related ones in as possible, the humour is not with irony but a recreation of the era. The humour instead is sly jokes or the cheesy mood of public television the creators are trying to recreate, LaMartina the main director but some of the adverts involving other collaborators alongside his own work.

Some of the film is even fast forwarded through, which would have still taken work to film those scenes designed to be sped through, fully setting up the presentation with the unseen viewer adding comedy by becoming bored, or that for accuracy to actual television adverts do repeat, especially the one for a carpet store. The individual adverts, and there are a lot of them, are eclectic but as necessary in their amount. The film is as much a nostalgic ode to the eighties but a far more legitimate one as it is not interpreting the era in a distorted idealised, but actually shooting on real television equipment and looking of the era. The humour comes from unintentional comedy or the material likely to have been found of the era, such as a quaintness of old ads (or the bluntness of the political attack ads in the midst of an election year), or from the characters themselves. Gavin Gordon as the male presenter who tries to milk jokes from his news materials, with his co-host Deborah Merritt (Leanna Chamish), or Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf), the grizzled host of the TV special, promising in-between ads for a Video Arcade with a Pizzeria ad a live séance. Fahrenkopf as Stewart is the stand-out of the film, an exceptional performance, but in general, this film raises the highest bar in terms of quality for a micro-budget genre film, as with everything from the film the acting from everyone is good.  

Everything in the film is pitched at the perfect tone, as much the show to see the presentation as it is the narrative, balancing a story where the TV special becomes increasingly likely to have been invaded by malicious forces, and the cheap-and-cheerful humour of this presentation in tone and in the adverts, having to match the time period and becoming inspired as a result. The fictional TV movies are a hoot for this in particular, from Doggone It!, a TV movie about a working woman who has to learn to take care of a dog, to Sarcophagus, one I would gladly see about an Egyptian mummy rampaging across a metropolis. There are also ads meant to recreate what the period was actually like, such as for wildlife video cassettes.

Nostalgia can be the cheapest pop to entice an audience with, cinema frankly plagued by its inability in the 2010s to move past the eighties or remember the decades beforehand, but WNUF feels like a historical recreation even I, who was born in England in 1988 when the decade was going out the door, can find meaningful due to the heart and hard work for accuracy. It delights not in a handful of mainstream films and pop culture references, but so much of the decade called the nineteen eighties. The local television itself or the jokes about glam metal, be it a reference to a real band like White Lion to a fake metal compilation album "Feel the Steel", with made up bands like Jaxxon and R.O.T.O.R. or all the anti-drug adverts, from the time when saying no to drugs was a huge political campaign in the United States. Not merely one, but multiple ads about the dangers of drug taking.

Eventually the plot drip feeds in more and more, how in the midst of this planned séance, at a home of a son who apparently murdered his parents under the influence of a Ouija Board, there is an ominous prescience there alongside the indignation of the show not going to planned, elaborate enough to have hired a married couple of paranormal investigators involved as interesting eccentric figures in their own right. Most of this still plays out as comedy, and shows the casts' talent in the performances, such as Frank's straining annoyance with members of the public joke they would call the Ghostbusters or phone the séance to tell their dead grandmother she is a bitch, to Robert Long II as Father Joseph Matheson, a Catholic priest very reticent to perform an exorcism after all the times he is called to do so, which has a reason to it plot wise but also feels like an amusing parody of the fact Catholic priests are always the figures brought in when something unnatural is afoot in horror fiction.

The film does build more horror as it goes along, and in this sense the film is as much a tribute to that era as well, even managing a lot more subtle named references to horror directors for minor characters, more so because they are not the known horror stewards referenced but the likes of micro budget filmmaker Todd Sheets or David DeCoteau. Only around the last half an hour does WNUF have more broader jokes, particulate the more adult ads that appear as it gets later in the world's time scale, such as one for a Gentlemen's club (who offers special offer breakfasts) or a video rental store that, as accurate to the time by offering VHS and Betamax, does have its tongue in its cheek by mentioning the Adult Section before the Family one. It has however fully fleshed out a world by this point, with ads even interlinking with references to others, and when it does build to a more serious tone, the structure allows creativity, such as cutting to a news special report on a rise in Satanic vandalisation and animal sacrifice as the producers panic, allowing the film to also reference the Satanic Panic movement of the eighties at the same time.

There is also a bit of anti-fundamentalist content as, in contrast to the celebration of Halloween, there are Christians fervently against the season who are not subtly depicted at all. [Major Spoiler Warning] That plays into the final with no one thinking of the contradiction against Christ's own teachings as they act like sociopaths. [Spoiler Ends] Whilst I was fully aware of how the film ends before seeing the film, affecting my opinion, it does have a twist which does drastically effect the context of WNUF's structure as a found footage film, a subtle one even if the film does lean more into gruesome content in the finale. I will say thought that, as a result of never having the twist jump me from nowhere, it is not really the crux of the film for me with the work. It is helped though by the fact, whilst it confirms some things and is an interesting ending, there is still a lot left unknown which can allow for subjective opinion, allowing it to have more mystery to it to compensate for this fact.

What WNUF Halloween Special is altogether is something really special, and in dire need of greater accessibility even if a cult does grow around the production. SOV films are an acquired taste, but this is arguably the best of them I have seen, good enough to show to anyone with the delight that it was so well put together and ambitious, embracing the cheap when necessary and on purpose without irony, and making sure everything from its tone to the public television aesthetic were properly replicated. It shows this sub-genre of filmmaking's best virtues, the ones I have fallen in love with them for, but also with absolute devotion to making a legitimately good film at the same time. It is also a perfect Halloween viewing experience, a film which in context is perfect to view on the day and, to time stamp this review a little, to deliberately choose to put the first review of mine of this film on the 31st October rather than a more well known production.